Month: April 2014

We are using Kayako for our support ticket system. I just updated our server from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 14.04. We started to see a problem with some crons which automate the importing and processing of emails.

2 – The destination site does not like the cipher. This can be caused by a poor cipher configuration in Apache or anonymous ciphers is disabled on the server.

Finally – and this was my problem…

The php script that was making the request was located on the same server as the Kayako support ticket system. The url for the server was something like support.randomhacks.co.uk and the hostname of the server was also support.randomhacks.co.uk . So, when looking up the DNS record for support.randomhacks.co.uk the computer went to /etc/hosts and returned 127.0.0.1 rather than the public ip address. So, when the script tried to connect to Apache at 127.0.0.1 using https it failed because SSL certificates a limited to one ip address only and this was the public IP address.

I hope help solve you problem. I would be great to hear if you have another solution.
I hope this helps someone.

I have just upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 14.04 on our Bacula backup server. Everything is backing up okay however it’s failing to delete the catalogue backup job after it has run. The error message is:

We are starting to upgrade lots of machines now that support for Windows XP has ended. Naturally, we are installing Ubuntu on as many machines as possible… but sometimes there are software restrictions and we have to make a purchasing decision between Apple and Windows.

Apple hardware is cheaper longterm
What is really interesting it that we are finding it is cheaper to replace Windows machines with Apple Macs. Surely this isn’t possible!? Well actually it is. Here is how I see it. There are obviously two components that make up a computer:

Hardware
Generic super crap Windows hardware is cheaper than Apple hardware. However, if you get something good quality, there isn’t much in it. For example:

The processor is better on the Fujitsu but not by much and even though Fujistu make great gear there is no denying that the quality of the Mac Mini is the best. Note – you can’t upgrade either without voiding their warranties.

Software
Short term, we don’t need to purchase anti-virus, firewalls and generally remove the bundled crap that always comes with a Windows machine. In fact, everything just works better on a Mac out the box.

Longterm, you always need to reinstall and upgrade an operating system in the future. The key here is that Apple makes it free to upgrade or reinstall. Windows charge around £100 for a license. Therefore, over the life of the machine it will cheaper to own an Apple product.

I’ve been a member of the Naked Wines – however I come to conclusion that it isn’t very good value for money and the range of wines isn’t very good. However, it isn’t clear how to cancel your naked wines account and Google doesn’t have this as a good page range. This post isn’t purely to help that!

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 13.10 to Ubuntu 14.04. However, after I had entered the username and password the computer froze. Unity just appears to hang. I fixed this by reinstalling Unity.

Note – this problem might have be caused by the upgrade process. I’m not sure it was related to this error message:

(gtk-update-icon-cache:19911): GdkPixbuf-WARNING **: Cannot open pixbuf loader module file '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache': No such file or directory
This likely means that your installation is broken.
Try running the command
gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders > /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache to make things work again for the time being.

I tried running gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders > /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache but this didn’t seem to fix the problem.

Step 1 – Get into the terminal
You enter the terminal by holding down ctrl-atl and pressing f2. You can actually press any of the f (function) key and you get a new terminal.

If you read the heartbleed.com website – it suggested the Ubuntu is not secure because there are still using openssl 1.0.1f. If your Ubuntu computer is up to date then it is secure. Ubuntu have back ported the changes from openssl 1.0.1g to 1.0.1.f.